Daughter of Mischief
by Muffinsweep11
Summary: Darcy's just your regular intern with no clue of what she's actually doing, right? Loki's not entirely sure he's comfortable with his daughter — who is totally shirking her duties in Hel — taking pictures of Thor stuffing his face.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: This is my first attempt at a Thor fanfic. In fact, it's my first outside of the musical section and a very different style from how I usually write. I've never read the comics, fyi, I just got really hooked onto the whole Hel!Darcy idea, so I gave it a shot (I know Hel's appearing in Ragnarok as a separate character but whatever this is Fanfiction).**

* * *

In her defense, it had been dark, and he'd been acting crazy, and she'd just loved the look on his face when she tasered him.

It was not how she'd planned her reunion with her thunder god uncle — in fact, she hadn't even planned one — but she couldn't have asked for a more ironical situation.

She let Jane fuss over him, whisk him to the hospital. Jane was something she hadn't planned either when she came to Midgard, but found herself liking the mortal the more science stuff about the Bifrost she threw. As Hela, Darcy'd never bothered to learn the workings of the Bifrost when she was younger; astrophysics had clearly never been her thing. Political science, on the other hand, had been drilled into her since birth, all thanks to Odin. He just couldn't wait to get rid of her and 'assign' her to manage Niflheim. Not that she really blamed him, after all the councils she'd unceremoniously crashed and nearly jeopardised - she'd blamed her dad's blood for her behaviour.

The hospital reeked of death. She could sense the dying, suffering souls, those tethering on the edge of life. The side effects of her position as ruler of Niflheim. She hated hospitals. It was where her Feeling took a joy ride. That slight tingling in her fingertips, feeling the contracts signed by the hand of her secretaries, the gates of her mansions opening to let in a new stream of permanent residents.

A man fresh from a car accident in the A&E block slipped into her realm. A mercy killing took a braindead woman from the ICU. Cancer shoved another middle-aged man from the living.

She decided to focus on Jane's voice.

"I've never met him," Jane was telling the nurse.

"Before she hit him with a car," Darcy supplied even-toned.

"I grazed him," Jane corrected hastily. "But she tasered him."

She was unable to hide the smirk. "Yes, I did."

* * *

She was a little disappointed when Thor glanced by her with no hint of recognition, but she supposed he was too caught up trying to prove himself to Odin and be released from whatever banishment her grandfather'd placed on him for whatever idiotic stunt he'd pulled. And plus, she'd altered her appearance slightly to prevent mortals from jumping on her and throwing her into a research lab for looking like she'd risen from the dead - which she had, technically, though clambering up the branches of the Yggdrasil from Niflheim to Midgard hadn't been nearly as elegant as she'd liked to imagine 'rising from hell' - not to mention she'd gotten attacked by a squirrel on her way up - Ratatoskr'd never liked her.

But still, after going through all the trouble to keep her uncle out of the mortal asylum by bringing him in after casually pointing out to Jane that he was the man in her 'freak storm', slight disappointment was inevitable. It must run in her family, to save Thor's ass and not be recognised.

Which reminded her, she hadn't checked up on her father lately. She wondered briefly if he'd had anything to do with Thor's banishment. Probably. Definitely.

She fished out her phone and turned on the universal roaming. It'd been an invention of her own, inspired by the mortals' web of media, she'd woven a universal network across the branches of the World Tree to keep in touch with her relatives, namely, her father.

 **Hela:** Hey dad, how's everything going? Uncle Thor's here btw.

He was probably sulking in some obscure location in Asgard, or buried in a book in a dark corner of the massive library of eternal corridors. He'd never favoured using the mobile phone she'd given him, but he'd reply her text messages anyways, when they came maybe once a year.

She heard Thor's thundering footsteps before he opened his mouth to speak. "Lady..."

"Darcy," she supplied. "What do you want?"

"When will you feast?" he asked her. "I hunger for food."

"There's pop-tarts in the cupboard, Hamlet," she said, gesturing to the cupboards.

Twenty minutes later, Jane announced they were going out to Isabelle's.

"But he just ate!" Darcy faltered slightly at the sight of the box of pop-tarts, which had been full a moment ago.

Now it was empty. She groaned, and picked up her beanie and jacket submissively.

When she didn't receive a reply from her father by the time the group reached Isabelle's, she decided to get a little impatient.

 **Hela:** Hello?

 **Hela:** Dad?

 _Dad is typing..._

Excellent; he wasn't dead. She didn't need to deal with him in her halls.

 **Dad:** I'm a Frost Giant.

 **Hela:** WHAT

 **Dad:** I'm a Jotun.

 **Hela:** Oh cool! Does that mean you can freeze stuff?

 **Dad:** Hela. This is not cool.

 **Hela:** Yea it is. Literally and figuratively.

 **Dad:** I'm a monster.

 **Hela:** And that's totally a recent thing.

 **Dad:** Hela!

 **Hela:** So Thor's not really my uncle?

 **Dad:** No.

 **Hela:** Hah! I knew there was no way I could be related to that blockhead! What's he doing here anyways?

 **Dad:** He invaded Jotunheim.

 **Hela:** Did you suggest it?

 **Dad:** I might have implied it.

 **Hela:** Dad!

 **Dad:** Would you rather he be ruling the kingdom now?

 **Hela:** Good point. Well, we're ordering food now, ttyl.

 **Dad:** ttyl?

 **Hela:** Talk to you later, Dad.

 **Dad:** Right.

 **Hela:** Go freeze something.

 **Hela:** Actually don't do that. Just try not to kill anyone. My secretaries have their hands full today. Right, bye :)

 **Dad:** What does :) have anything to do with farewells?

 **Hela:** It's called a smiley face, Dad, you sould actually try putting one on your face once it a while. I gtg, so bye.

 _Dad is typing…_

 **Hela:** Got to go. BYE.

"Darcy? Anything for you?"

"Naw, I'm not really that hungry," she replied, pocketing her phone. She nodded over to Thor. "He looks like he could devour the planet though."

She could imagine him doing that.

Six pancakes, a mountain of scrambled eggs and at least half a dozen sausages later, she was pretty sure Jane and Erik could imagine the same.

"So how'd you get inside that cloud?" she asked teasingly, though her other two companions were too shocked by Thor's gorging to register the jest. "Also how could you eat an entire box of pop-tarts and still be this hungry?"

The last one was a genuine question. Her uncle's unnaturally big appetite never failed to baffle her.

He held up his cup. "This drink, I like it."

Finally, something they agreed on. "I know, it's great right?"

He lifted the cup. " _Another!"_

Oh crap.

She let Jane berate him. The thunder god stood no chance.

Later, she took a picture of him, telling him that it was for Facebook, before sending it to her father.

 **Dad:** Wth?

 **Hela:** Happy belated birthday dad.

 **Hela:** Oh, and stop swearing with my realm. That's just lousy fatherly support.

 **Dad:** I'm deleting it. Now.

 **Hela:** The picture or my realm?

 **Dad:** Both. I have Gungnir in my hands now.

 **Hela:** Shit. I love you Dad.

* * *

 **A/N: Btw, I'm posting this at 12:30AM. I tend to do idiotic things then.**


	2. Chapter 2

She had this iPod. It looked like any other Midgardian iPod only it was not. It was her work device that no one touched except for her. It was actually a magical gift dish from her father that she'd named Hunger before Loki calmly mentioned that it was supposed to be used for scrying rather than eating. It was a shape-shifting object that could change to whatever form suited her and was her means of skyping and messaging her secretaries or administrators or other people in Niflheim who were in dire need of her immediate judgment. And it played good music.

And SHIELD had just taken it away.

She tried not to panic. It was highly unlikely that SHIELD would expect anything to be on that device, it being the shape of an iPod. And surely her secretaries had it covered down there.

Her uncle and Jane had set off to retrieve the stuff and his magical hammer - which she'd never managed (or bothered) to pronounce correctly - but knowing her uncle's arrogance and hot-headedness, she wasn't counting on getting her magical dish back anytime soon.

* * *

Darcy knew never to Google herself - Everyone knew not to Google themselves unless they were utterly bored and in need of some comic relief. But when Erik added the new addition to the coffee table she couldn't help but pick it up and start flipping through the heavily abridged and illustrated version of _Tales of Norse Mythology._

Odin, they just couldn't get her half-nose right, could they?

"I can't just leave him there..." Jane was saying as she paced the empty lab.

"Why not?" asked Erik.

"You didn't see what happened," insisted Jane. True, but Darcy had a pretty good idea of what'd happened given Thor's saddeningly predictable tendency to drive his fist into everything he saw.

"Hey! Mew mew!" Wow, this illustration made it look more impressive than it actually was.

Jane glanced over and finally noticed the book. She stared pointedly at Erik. "Where did you find this?"

"In the children's section," Erik muttered, swiping the book right from under Darcy's nose. "I wanted to show you how ridiculous his story was."

"Aren't you the one who's always told me to chase down all leads, all possibilities?" asked Jane.

"I was talking about science, not magic!" exclaimed Erik, exasperated.

"'Magic's just science we don't understand yet'," Jane quoted. "Arthur C. Clarke."

"Who wrote science fiction," Erik deadpanned.

"The precursor of science fact."

"In some cases."

"If that's really an Einstein-Rosen Bridge out there, then there's something on the other side. Advanced beings could have come through it before!"

"Jane..."

"A primitive culture like the Vikings might have worshipped them as deities," Darcy butted in finally.

The pairs of eyes landed on her, stunned. What, was she not entitled to some insightful commentary now and then?

"Y-Yes!" exclaimed Jane, breaking out of her momentary stupor. "Exactly, thank you!"

Darcy beamed at Erik.

The scientist caved. "Fine," he grumbled. "I'll go get him."

* * *

Darcy decided she could really do without the unexpected reunions, especially those that lost her a good cup of coffee.

Erik had just finished pointing out all the cons of Jane's explanation of the Yggdrasil - courtesy of Thor, obviously, although it baffled her to think why her uncle was hitting on Jane with a magical World Tree - when they found the Warriors Three's and Sif's smiling faces plastered against the glass door of the lab that morning.

Her fingers went numb with horror and panic, and her mug crashed onto the floor next to Erik's.

She mourned the coffee later. Niflheim didn't have a place for spilt coffee, but she figured she would have to deal with a very highly caffeinated Beethoven if there were, so she supposed it was for the best.

"My friends!" Thor ran forward to embrace his friends like a kid running towards a Christmas tree. "This is good!"

This was totally _not_ good. If they recognized her...

Erik was muttering in disbelief and Jane's mouth was hanging open when Volstagg noticed them mortals.

"Oh excuse me," he said, chuckling goodheartedly. "The Lady Sif and the Warriors Three," he introduced, though from the look of Erik's face that revealed his childhood fanboyism, Jane was the only one who needed the introduction.

Then Sif's gaze landed on her. "Hela?"

Crap crap crap. Sif was someone she'd spent a lot of time learning to sword fight with, and unlike her uncle, Sif wouldn't forget a face.

She resorted to feigning ignorance. "Ummm...who?"

Sif's eyes only narrowed. Damn. Her 'play dumb' card had always worked on Jane and Erik, but Sif was a whole different situation.

"Hela?" echoed Thor, guffawing. "This is Lady Darcy Lewis! It would not do you well to compare this fair lady to that troublemaker of Hel, Sif."

Darcy didn't know whether to thank Thor or smack him. His offhanded insult had thrown Sif off, but not completely. She could still feel the female warrior's eyes on her as the conversation continued.

And then just when she thought nothing could worsen the situation, Grandpa Odin's Terminator dropped in town.

It took her a few seconds to remember who held Gungnir and thus who had sent the Destroyer, and when everyone else was out of earshot running helter-skelter to evacuate the town, she started cursing him with every profanity of every language of every realm.

After this, she decided as she picked up a stray dog and named it Baker while she ran, she was definitely going to arrange Thor and her father some sibling therapy sessions. Thorapy, she would call it.

Meanwhile, the futile attempts of the Warriors Three and Sif only seemed to irk the Destroyer like mosquitos did her arms. After a blast destroyed her favorite supermarket, Darcy was all ready to go all Lady Death on it.

But she could only imagine the shock and betrayal it would cause, not to mention the loss of an awesome mortal life here on Midgard. She wondered what Jane's face would look like -

Wait, what in Odin's beard was Thor doing?

'Suicide' was her number one guess when her uncle marched up to the destroyer and was instantly batted away like a rag doll.

Jane screamed as she ran. Sif's hand flew to her mouth. Erik looked like he'd had a heart attack.

Darcy looked down at her fingers, half-expecting the tingling as he slipped from the living.

There was nothing.

But he was nearly gone. Jane was weeping over his near-cold body.

He wasn't headed for Niflheim, then, which meant he must be headed for Valhalla. Which meant he was dying a worthy death. Which meant -

A sonic boom echoed in the distance as an object rocketed into the sky.

"Erik…" she alerted the old man to the incoming projectile.

Erik ran to Jane, pulling her from Thor's side just as Mew Mew hit his hand and promptly destroyed Darcy's retinas with his lightning display.

Her vision adjusted just enough to catch him back in his full glory, red cape and all, before he proceeded to pull a Hurricane Katrina around the Destroyer. One loud bang and one nuclear-like blast later, he emerged from the smoky aftermath of his level five storm in a badass walk towards Jane while it rained cars all around them.

 _Show off._

Some things never changed.

* * *

Darcy was overjoyed when Coulson told them they could have their things back. At least Thor had done one thing good for her today.

For Jane, she corrected herself. The minute he was done telling the agent off, he pulled Jane in and took off with her into the bright blue sky like a blond Superman, leaving the poor agent to splutter in the dust cloud he'd created.

As Erik went to liaise with Coulson and the Warriors Three engaged in a jovial recounting of Thor's amazing 'Return of the King' moment, she felt the presence of the female warrior beside her. "Hela."

Darcy sighed. Sif's persistence was greater than Thor's arrogance. "Aunt Sif."

The corner of Sif's lips twitched slightly, as if barely containing that triumph of being right. "Why are you here?"

"Curiosity," Darcy replied, shrugging half-heartedly. "And boredom. You get them after a few centuries of listening to Christopher Columbus repeating the tales of his voyages like a broken record."

"Why don't you tell him?'

"Who, Columbus? The guy's already depressed enough that he's dead. If I dampen his mood, he's gonna go on about voyages he could have taken if he'd lived a little longer, and trust me, that tale would take millennia to end."

"I meant Thor," drawled Sif.

"Oh. Well," She thought about it for a moment, before shrugging again. "I didn't want Thor messing up my human relations. And plus, It's fun."

Sif shook her head. "You're just like your father."

"Hey, I don't send Space Sauron after my brothers," Darcy protested (Although if she ever did, Fenris would probably devour it thinking it was the sun, Jormangundr would just treat it like a tin play toy and Sleipnir would most likely trample all over it).

Sif looked at her weirdly, probably wondering what mortal disease she was injecting into the Allspeak, but she seemed to get the message. "Loki…has been out of sorts lately. His mischief has become crueller and darkness grows in his heart. His motivations grow more…complicated than ever before."

"Well, give the guy a break," Darcy reasoned, "he just found out he's a Frost Giant."

"A _what?_ "

Oops.

"We should go, Sif," said Volstagg, approaching the pair. "Thor will meet us at the Bifrost."

Thank you, Gimli.

Sif gave her the this-conversation-is-not-over look before joining the Warriors Three as they hopped into the back of Jane's truck.

Oh, she wished she wasn't driving. Then she could have taken the tumblr-worthy picture of the four warriors in their Middle Ages getup stuffed in the metal van, with Fandral turning greener every time the van went over a bump. Which was quite often, considering they were in a desert.

When they reached the site of the Bifrost, Thor was yelling at the sky. Again. It made Darcy wonder if her uncle ever got the 'all-hearing' part of Heimdall's biology.

Evidently not.

But after Thor's several rounds of shouting was only met with tranquillity and lack of rainbow light, a chill of dread ran through her veins. "Something's not right," she whispered.

"Asgard must be in trouble," Sif deduced. She turned to Darcy. "We could use your help," she spoke in a low voice.

Darcy smiled sadly. As much as she yearned to see the golden halls and sky-high ceilings again, Asgard was no longer her home. Plus, Bifrost Airlines was never her favorite way of traveling; the trip always ended with her stomach contents on the floor.

But she wouldn't tell Sif that. Instead, she told the warrior quietly, "Asgard's been just fine without me these last couple of centuries. I'm sure with the Warriors Three and Lady Sif and Prince Thor at her aid, she has nothing to worry about."

Sif smiled, seeing straight through the lie - omission of truth, her father called it. "You have your father's gift of the Silvertongue, Hela Lokidottir," she commented. And then she seemed to consider for a moment, before saying, "I have missed you and your words of assurance."

It was then Thor's yells were finally answered by a swirling funnel of cloud, from which leaked that familiar light of a thousand colors.

"I meant every word," assured Darcy, as the Warriors Three started towards the Bifrost and Thor began whispering promises to Jane (that he was likely not to remember, knowing her Uncle).

"I'm sure you did," said Sif. There was no sarcasm in her tone (sarcasm was a tool strictly reserved for herself and her father).

"I will miss you," Darcy blurted out.

"As will I." Sif gave a curt nod, and went to join the Asgardians as they got ready to be sucked up into the rainbow vortex.

As they watched the five warriors disappear off the face of Midgard, Darcy failed to notice the suspicious scrutiny of Erik Selvig.

* * *

 **A/N: Thanks for the reviews guys! As you might have noticed, the rate at which I** **update is nearly as slow as BBC's Sherlock, so sorry in advance and I applaud you if you're still reading this.**


	3. Chapter 3

When you get a Skype call from Christopher Marlowe, you know it's trouble.

Darcy later resented the fact that she might've come across as one of those phone leeches upon retrieving her iPod. Because the very first thing she did when she got her hands back on it was to dash to her room, lock the door behind her and with a wave of her hand, transform Hunger into a laptop.

And the very first thing, or rather things, that popped up on her screen were Christopher Marlowe's nostrils.

Was that a booger —?

Sometimes she wished the camera down in Helheim didn't have such high definition.

"Is it on?" She heard him mutter.

"Yes, Chris, and you don't need to sniff the camera."

The camera shifted until she finally got a full view of the English writer's fully bearded face — he refused to use the shaving cream Darcy had sent him, claiming that it felt like his face had been stuffed in an oven (though she doubted he even knew what an oven was).

"Ah, Lady Hela!"

"What happened now?" Marlowe was the Communication Department's last resort, they only used him if the other officers – who actually knew how to operate Skye – had their hands full.

"Your father."

Darcy sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Temper tantrum?"

"A gargantuan one this time. The gates to Niflheim are bottlenecked with about a thousand Jotunns."

Darcy's jaw dropped. "What the Helheim did he do?"

"Department of Cause-of-Death's looking into it now but based on their reports it looks like the Bifrost is the murder weapon."

"More like genocide," muttered Darcy. The Jotunn were never a friendly species, but they were a species nonetheless – her species, as her latest discovery went. And being the one to let them into Niflheim, Darcy was on pretty good terms with them. Her father screwing them over was the last thing she needed.

Suddenly Marlowe's attention seemed to be drawn to the space behind her. "Who's the chick in the background?"

"What chi — Jane!" Darcy nearly tumbled off her bed upon seeing the astrophysicist at the door. "How did you get in?" _How much had she heard?_

Jane's brows furrowed slightly with incomprehension. "Um, through the door?"

Crap. Darcy'd forgotten that her lock was broken, all thanks to Thor – he'd tried to wake her up for breakfast one morning by pounding on the door, and when she failed to rouse he'd broken down the door on the excuse that 'he thought she was dead' - he never realised how close he actually was in his assumption.

"Sorry, was I interrupting something?" Jane inquired.

And then, being the sociable Elizabethan, Marlowe decided to open his mouth. "Greetings, I'm Christopher Mar – "

"Martin!" Darcy cut in quickly. "Christopher Martin, he's my college roommate." She turned to the screen with a stare she hoped said catch-on-or-i-will-make-you-scrub-every-inch-of-Helheim. "Chris, this is my mentor, Jane Foster."

"Hello!" Trust Jane to be friendly with dead people. "Do you major in political science too?"

"Science? I'm a writer!" exclaimed Marlowe, failing to keep offence out of his tone. "My works are the very heart of literature!"

It was then Darcy quickly slammed her laptop close, hoping to do damage control. "Aaanyways, what it is you wanted to see me about, Jane?"

Jane was still staring at the closed laptop, still trying to make sense of what she'd seen. Then she shook her head, trying to rearrange her thoughts. "Um, I... Do you want lunch? Erik and I are going to the...well, whatever food place that isn't in ruins."

"Uhh, sure," Darcy agreed half-heartedly, too focused on getting Jane out of her room as soon as possible.

But Jane just stood there, staring at her expectantly. Expecting what?

"Oh," Darcy flushed. "You mean now, and you mean like walk out of here and get stuff?"

"Yes...?" Jane cocked her head in slight confusion, as if what Darcy had asked didn't even qualify as a question. Of course, you moron, Darcy self-chided, you'd never have a reason to have no time for lunch. She couldn't exactly tell Jane that she was too busy dealing with hell about alien genocide her crazy father had committed.

"Alright then," she said, jumping up from the bed. "Let me just get my trusty beanie and coat and we'll be lunching in no time."

She later wished she hadn't said yes to lunch. The lunch they had that afternoon was probably the award winner for the awkwardest meal of the year. No one really wanted to talk about the past week, and Erik and Jane could only talk astrophysics, which led back to Thornado, so neither of them could hold a proper conversation. Darcy would say something at random in an attempt to fire up a discussion but she discovered physicists weren't the most sociable people. And so to end the one-way conversation that made her look like she was talking to herself, the trio settled with a very uncomfortable, no-way conversation that led Darcy wishing she were back in Niflheim dealing with a horde of angry frost giants.

The journey back to the lab was spent in silence as well. In spite of New Mexico's heat, Darcy could feel nothing but frost radiating from Jane. She wondered briefly if Jane could be a Frost Giant too.

When they got back to the lab, Jane made a beeline for her room, and her companions watched helplessly as she quietly closing the door behind her.

Then, as she too was about to abscond to her room, Darcy received a tap on the shoulder.

"Darcy," spoke Erik, as she turned to face him. "I was wondering if I could talk to you for a moment."

"Sure, Erik, anything," she replied, though slightly puzzled. Such moments were rare, since there seemed to be a language barrier between her and Erik — his science talk always clashed with her political talk.

"As you can tell Jane's been...really devastated," Erik began slowly. "She's starting to detach and disconnect. She won't talk to me, and we can't conduct productive research without...intellectual discussion.

"Maybe you could...take her out? You can take her mind off her research and hence...you-know-who." A sore subject for Jane was a sore subject for Erik, that's how close they were.

"She'll open up to you, perhaps talking to you would help her de-stress."

"A girls' night out?" summarized Darcy.

"Precisely," said Erik. "So you'll do it?"

"Sure."

A smile returned to Erik's old weary face. "Thank you, Darcy."

"Anything for Jane," Darcy said perkily. "After all, she's the one who has to sign my documentation for the college points."

* * *

She had about a few hours to kill before Jane and her night out. Since her father was irritatingly unresponsive to her angry spam of texts, she set to clearing her work.

She reopened her laptop, and once again Marlowe popped up onto her screen. "Lady Hela, thank goodness you're back!" he exclaimed.

"What monstrosity do I have to deal with now?" asked Darcy.

Marlowe fidgeted uncomfortably. "Uhh, I think I'll let you see for yourself."

The display screen switched to the interrogation room.

She recognised her new client instantly.

"Laufey," she greeted him curtly.

"Lady Hela." Despite being a rugged, savage Frost Giant king - ex-king, Darcy remembered - Laufey knew to respect the goddess of the dead, his judge and new ruler for the rest of his un-life.

"You look well," she said simply.

"Killed by the hand of an Asgardian does not make me feel well," he grumbled.

Perhaps it was her inborn and hereditary nature to create mischief, or her mere curiosity. Either way, she decided now was the perfect time to drop the bomb on him, for the fun of it. "A Jotunn runt actually," she corrected, a slight tint of smugness creeping into her tone.

Damn, she needed a screenshot Laufey's face.

His eyes went wide in realisation and perhaps, devastation. "My own son…" he whispered.

What the - ?

"Your _what?_ " Dammit, she bet Laufey wanted a screenshot of her face now.

Laugher's red eyes had lowered to gaze upon the table in front of him. "I had a runt child, back in the Asgardian-Jotunn war. He was taken from me...and alack, now I know what becomes of him. A traitorous Asgardian, turned against me!" Frost started to creep up the walls behind him, "Odin, you arrogant son of a bi - "

"Woah, grandpaps, language!" Darcy hastily cut him off, flailing her arms about in some defensive taekwondo jig. She ended her freestyle with an accusing finger jab at the screen, "And stop making life difficult for my cleaners," she barked, "I don't want to have to invest in enough hairdryers to thaw that stuff."

Laufey obeyed, but his red eyes still held withering rage that could have burned a hole right through the metal table.

The supervising officer in the room popped into the screen. "My lady, what is your verdict?"

Darcy took a deep breath. "In the name of...recently-discovered family, I will let you have a private room in the East Wing." Then she added, "If I find that you're causing trouble somehow, screw family! I will put you in the basement."

"Your...kindness...is greatly appreciated, my lady," Laufey said, with perceptible reluctance, perhaps still en route to the resignation of his fate.

"You're welcome," Darcy replied chirpily. "Anything for family."

* * *

Her job as goddess of Hel made her quite an adept listener, but even her awesome skills at listening were challenged by Jane's perpetual torrent of moaning and groaning about her golden boy that night.

"Darcy..." moaned the astrophysicist, as she downed her fifth shot of the night. "Do you think he's forgotten about me?"

Yes. "Well - "

"I mean, I suppose he's the god of thunder, and I'm just a mere mortal." Then, she seemed to reconsider, "But those moments we shared, that night under the stars, those tales he spoke of. He was so charming Darce, I really believed for a moment there that he cared for me, that I mattered to him."

The only one who truly mattered to Thor was himself, as far as Darcy was concerned, still sour (though she would not admit it aloud) from his failure to recognise her (something that was for the better, she realised). "I think - "

"His eyes, when I first saw them, it was like an electric shock, a tremendous vitality running through my veins."

"Maybe it was the energy storm?" put in Darcy.

"No..." slurred Jane, "it was definitely some...fantastic connection between us. I felt it Darce, as our eyes locked. His eyes, those perfect, blue, pools of...of..."

"Arrogance?" suggested Darcy, but knew it would bounce right off the entranced girl.

"Of heroism, and courage! Oh, Darce, it was magical! And his arms, when he carried me, they were so firm, and strong, like he could carry me forever and I wouldn't have to worry about falling, because I know he would always be there. We'd be together, he would save the world and the universe, and when he's done he'll scoop me up and wrap me in those strong arms of his and take me to see it all...the stars...the galaxy...the infinite universe beyond...he should be here...why isn't he here...?" She began to sob.

Darcy felt like the most useless friend in all the nine realms when she could only offer Jane a tissue. "Jane...I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason why - "

Jane downed another shot and soon the vodka was in control of her tongue. "All my life, I've dreamed of touching the stars! I've studied stars my whole life! Dedicated my time, sacrificed my family for them, longing to discover the beyond! Then a man _from_ the stars, comes to me, isn't that just the thing I deserve? Don't I deserve him, after all these years? He must have come to me for a reason, so why did he leave?

"Why am I stuck down here, carrying on with life when I know we're just transient spasms of dust in this vast unending universe? When I know somewhere, he's out there, an immortal god, making a difference, shaping the universe! Why can't I do that too? Why must I carry on? Why am I...why..."

The alcohol took over, and exhaustion wrapped its fingers around her aching soul. Her head was pulled to the table, and soon she was slumped over the bar. Darcy's hand rested on her back, hoping that it might provide some comfort through the dark, starless night.

* * *

 **A/N: no, I did not get sucked into some wormhole for three months. I just got lost in my pile of assignments.**


	4. Chapter 4

Darcy usually refrained from using her magic, knowing Odin would definitely disapprove of her being on Midgard then (he was already quite pissed, but what did Darcy care?). However, drunk-and-knocked-out Jane called for a teleportation spell, and after dragging Jane's deadweight body to the ladies, she waved her hand and they were back in Jane's caravan.

Quickly settling Jane into her bed, Darcy rushed back to the main house, eager to get her shut-eye. After fumbling through her purse in the dark, she retrieved her key and unlocked the door, stepping into the dark living room. Kicking off her shoes, she was about to head to her bedroom when suddenly a voice rang out in the dark.

"Darcy."

Darcy nearly jumped out of her skin (or her glamour). She stumbled back against the nearby counter, clutching her chest as her heart (or un-heart) recovered from that unexpected shock.

Upon spotting the origin of the voice, she exclaimed, "Geez! Erik, you scared me!"

The man was seated behind the counter at the other end of the room, his silhouette barely visible in the dim moonlight.

"We need to talk," Erik's voice was dangerously soft, his tone tethering on the edge of defensive.

Darcy pulled herself upright, advancing slowly and uncertainly. What did he want?

He raised his right hand, which held a small device, and Darcy came to a shuddering halt. It was Hunger.

Shit.

"I found some...interesting things on your iPod, Darcy," he began coolly. "Death certificates of every single person who died of sickness or old age in the last few millennia."

Though internally sweating and panicking like a headless chicken, Darcy feigned calm ignorance. "Last few millennia?" she repeated, hoping her voice sounded as neutral as possible. "How do you know?" How did he get through her million and one passwords?

"Liu Bei was a Chinese warlord who died of illness in 223 AD. Hamnet Shakespeare's here too, 1596 AD from the Plague," said Erik, never taking his eyes off her. "Thousand years worth of deaths, all on this one device that is supposed to play music." Erik slammed the device on the table, causing Darcy to start slightly.

"This isn't an iPod, Darcy," he said sternly, lips trembling as he pointed at Hunger like it was an infectious disease. "I'd like to know what this is and who you work for. Is it the CIA? UNIT? Torchwood?"

"Woah, Erik, I ain't torching any wood here," Darcy cut in, lifting her hands in surrender. "I'm my own person. I don't work for anyone."

But the old man remained unconvinced. "That's a poor attempt at espionage. Are you here to take Jane's and my research? Hiding your archives and intel on some simple device?"

"I'm not a spy, Erik," said Darcy, rather tiredly.

"Oh? Then what are you? You can't fool me, Darcy, you spend too much time on this device and have too much attachment to it for it _just_ to be an ordinary iPod," Erik rattled on, slowly losing whatever little cool he had left. "And you're _not_ an ordinary intern. I saw you talking to Sif at the Bifrost site. You two have met before. So I'll ask you one more time: who are you?"

Erik's demand was met with silence as Darcy considered her options.

"You really want to know?" Darcy asked quietly, unable to keep the resignation out of her voice.

Please say no, please say no. "Yes."

Darcy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She called up the magic within her, her seidr, the one tethered to her facade. She felt it stirring, for once in a long while since she'd arrived in Midgard, like a muscle held too long in one position.

And then she focused on one spot, she let it loose. Daring herself to look, she opened her eyes, bringing up her right hand and watching as her glamour faded away, revealing the corpse beneath. Bringing it up, she attempted (and failed) a friendly wave towards the man across the room.

"My name is Hela. I'm the goddess of Hel. Nice to meet you."

* * *

As soon as those words left her mouth, she watched as her last moment as Darcy Lewis in Erik's eyes faded into nothingness. She knew that in that brain of Erik's, he was re-cataloguing his profile of her, pulling out the old myths of his childhood and fitting them onto her, layering filters of Hela over Darcy, till the portrait of the political science intern was replaced by the portrait of the centuries-old goddess of death.

She watched as the old man's eyes widened. "You're...Hela," Erik reiterated slowly.

"Yup," confirmed Darcy, popping her 'p'. Her glamour she'd slipped back on like a glove, but Erik was still staring at her hand with wide and wary eyes.

"Norse goddess of death?"

"Among other things," said Darcy, "such as Yggdrasil network extraordinaire, royal pain in Odin's ass, etcetera."

"Loki's daughter."

Immediately the atmosphere shifted. So that's why he was so on guard. Not because she was a deity, no, Erik'd had plenty of that last week, but because she was the offspring of the asshole who'd blown up the town.

She lifted her chin defiantly, drawing back her shoulders. "I am not defined by my father's idiocy or his fetish with blowing things up. As I said, I am my own person - half a person, if you will."

Erik drew back at her words, and Darcy couldn't help the slight tinge of sadness. This was exactly why she didn't want Thor or his thick-headed friends blowing her mortal cover - because her own friends would never treat her the same.

"Do you mean to harm us?" asked Erik cautiously.

"Harm you?" Darcy repeated, undeniably hurt. "Erik, I may be some goddess of death to you, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm Darcy Lewis. Darcy is Hela and Hela is Darcy." Great, now she sounded like she belonged on Shutter Island.

She removed her beanie, dropping her gaze as she recollected herself. "Look, I just...want to make you see that I'm the same person as I was this morning."

Erik's striking blue gaze seemed to scan her once more, trying desperately to connect what she'd just said and what his mind was feeding him about the ruler of Hel.

Half a minute into the silence, he sighed. "Darcy, I'm sorry, it's just...you're a _goddess,"_ he stressed, still trying to reconfigure his brain. "More so the one the Norse portray as an all-powerful harbinger of death."

"Oh come on, those Norses tend to exaggerate," said Darcy. "A flair probably picked up from my uncle and his theatrics," she added, waving her hand dismissively.

Erik seemed to consider her a while more, but he definitely seemed more relaxed than when this gruelling interrogation started, so that was a plus. Then she noticed his eyes; how they darted between her and the doors; Erik's gaze seemed torn between Jane's caravan and Darcy.

"So can you...?" he began tentatively, all too aware he was standing on slippery ground.

"I can't get her to Asgard, if that's what you're asking," replied Darcy, knowing what he had in mind. It too had crossed her mind once. "From what I've heard, the Bifrost is broken, and the only way across worlds is by scaling the branches of the World Tree, which is virtually impossible for mortals."

When Erik raised a questioning brow, Darcy elaborated, "Impossible meaning if she doesn't get chewed up by Ratatoskr, she will be vaporized and die a horrible death and possibly end up as my roommate in Hel." Then she decided to further point out, "But even I can't enter Asgard, I was exiled."

Erik deflated slightly. "Jane...her mind would not rest until she finds him again. Do you...do you mean to tell her all this?"

For an extensively quiet moment, Darcy just stared into the empty, black space between them, imagining it opening up and swallowing her into the shadows. Then she lifted her head, willing her voice to remain steady in spite of her trembling heart, that heart so full of fear that what she was about to say would cause deeper pain in the friend she'd found in Jane. Her breath came out in a misty whisper.

"How can I?"

Only silence replied her lament.

* * *

 **A/N: I know, you guys deserve more, but hopefully this angsty stuff passes hahaha. I know I put this under humour, and there's just none right now, sorry 'bout that :( Do review!**


	5. Chapter 5

The air was palpable in the weeks that followed.

Erik seemed even more consumed in his work lately. He would not - could not - meet Darcy's eye, and on the rare occasions that she came within a proximity of less than six feet, she would only hear his muttering on and on about thermonuclear astrophysics or what have you.

Jane was still hurting, and talking to her was like treading on eggshells. But she'd begun once more to pick up her work, which Darcy took as a good sign of her moving on, then. Once in a while, Jane seemed to zone out to her fantasy land, perhaps where she and a less butt-headed version of her uncle kindled their electricity (haha) and had mini Thor's running around with cheap plastic versions of Mew Mew from Toys R Us.

It seemed everything was falling back into its boring, mundane place until Darcy got a call about a house visit down there.

"Lady Hela, your uncle is here to visit you."

The tone used by her Chief Communications Officer Alexander Graham Bell to annunciate that message was almost flatter than Erik's sense of humour. But the panic, oh, the panic that ruptured through Darcy was more powerful than the seismic waves of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake.

"Distract him, Al! I need time to get down there!" She threw down her phone and, with an abundance of f-bomb-dropping on the way, ran to the cupboard to pull out her backpack. She couldn't just teleport from here, not without Jane suspecting, and she refused to let her uncle be the reason of her blowing her cover. So she had to put on a show.

"Darcy, I need your help - what are you doing?" The request for a favour died on Jane's lips as she entered to the sight of Darcy shoving random clothes into her backpack with the fluster of a refugee on the run.

"I...I need to go," was all she could get out as she threw three mismatching socks of different sizes into her bag.

"Go where?" asked Jane, puzzled. "Does it have something to do with whoever was on the phone just now? Are you in trouble?" Erik, drawn by the commotion that was unusual given the past weeks of tranquillity, had come into the room now and joined Jane in watching Darcy's ungraceful performance.

"What? No..." Darcy forced a laugh but regretted it the moment she realised she sounded like a dying goose. "It's just...I need to leave town for a bit," she attempted to explain.

"What, why?"

"Umm..." she grappled for words to form an excuse as she jerked the bag zip close. Her silver tongue just had to fail her now! Damn Thor and his poorly timed intrusion!

"My uncle!" she cried, and Erik raised an amused brow, "is in the hospital! That was my, erm, mom on the phone, telling me to get on the first plane back to...to...Boston!" She slung her bag over her shoulder, jostled her way past her two mortal companions and dashed towards the front door.

"Boston? I thought your family was from Virginia?" Behind Jane, Erik had buried his face in his hand, as if shielding himself from the disaster that was her getaway.

"Same thing," said Darcy, too distracted to fine-tune her excuse. She jammed her feet into her sneakers, not even bothering to tie the laces. "I'll be back as soon as I'm sure he's alright! Won't be long!"

"But, Darcy - "

"Bye!" Wasting not another second, Darcy took off down the street, as fast as she could to gain as much distance as possible from the lab. She could just imagine the terrible distracting job Bell was doing down there, probably offering to educate her oaf of an uncle on the engineering behind the Midgardian telephone. She herself had tried to explain the workings of her universal roaming phones that Bell had co-created with her in his spare time (which, technically, was all the time in Hel). Her uncle's short attention span did not allow him to last more than a minute, and he was snoring on her couch before she even began to introduce the call function. In the end, she gave a phone only to her father, seeing as her uncle would never achieve the competency to use one.

'Course, it seemed her father was becoming equally as incompetent, seeing how he was still offline after almost three months since his last text.

But never mind her father's deteriorating phone use skills, she had more important things to worry about at present.

Once she sure she was a good distance from any civilization, she teleported. The dry, hot desert of New Mexico disappeared in a flash and was replaced by the vast, rocky snow-covered mountains of Tignes. Darcy shivered a little as her body adjusted to the change in atmosphere as she looked around for her ticket out of Midgard. Now, where was that damned rock formation?

Tapping into her seidr, Darcy activated a shielding spell that protected her from the freezing weather of the French Alps. Picking up her pace, she trudged through the freshly-fallen snow, scaling up the rocks to the peak of the mountain till she came face to face with the giant stone arch the French Midgardians called L'Aiguille Percée, or the Eye of the Needle*.

Casting another cloaking spell over herself, she snuck past the mountaineers shuffling through the snow, narrowly dodged a train of off-piste speed demon snowboarders, avoided photobombing a group of skiers taking a we-fie, and clambered up the rocks to the foot of the arch caked in ancient seidr.

As if sensing its nearby presence, her own magic hummed, in a low, infrasonic frequency that seemed to adjust itself to match that of the rock. The arch vibrated, and the wind around it swirled in a vertical whirlpool, until it formed a portal that seemed like a black hole against the white fog. Then, saying a quick prayer to the Norns that Ratatoskr would be more merciful on her this time, she leapt through the portal, into the darkness that was the foliage of the Yggdrasil.

Going down was so much more effortless than climbing up. All she did was fall, and when her feet hit a branch of seidr she sprung off immediately, falling yet again, her magic guiding her and pulling her like a lifeline towards the realm at the roots. There were some moments she heard scurrying, and she prayed harder that she could fall faster, that her realm would pull her in quickly before that vermin got to her.

Finally, her feet felt the roots of the Yggdrasil, and she rode the gradient of the seidr feeling like a female Tarzan until she reached the end, where the seidr melded into solid ground, and she felt the cold stale mist of Niflheim wash over her.

The Queen was back.

* * *

Bell was is an utter wreck when he saw her gliding through the gates to her mansion.

"He didn't even let me speak! His disinterest in acoustics astounds me!" he cried in apparent distress. "He kept on saying that he had to meet with you urgently and would not stand for another moment of my 'blabbering'! What part of an intellectual discussion about the theory of converting undulating electrical currents into sound waves is considered 'blabbering'?" His Scottish lilt became more apparent as he spoke, a benchmark Darcy had come to use to measure the extent of a Scotsman's (albeit American) anger.

"Al, calm down, it's not Ragnarok yet," said Darcy, as she mounted the steps of her mansion. "Go take your insulin, and tell my uncle I will be with him shortly."

Though far from pacified, the scientist nodded and marched through the doors to the main throne room. Darcy, meanwhile, took a hasty detour to her chambers, where she threw on her dark royal robes over her jumper and jeans, kicking off her sneakers (still unlaced) and slipping into a pair of ebony heels.

As she scampered back down the grand staircase Bell was at the bottom, waiting near the entrance to the throne room. "My lady, your face," he reminded.

Oh, right. Darcy whipped off her glasses and dropped her glamour, feeling the Midgardian facade melt away from her right side into a horrific but familiar corpselike appearance. Her healthy skin decayed into a grey mesh of bone and flesh, her right pupil lost its deep brown pigment and took on a milky white hue, as did her hair, with streaks of white now dominating the right side of her head. Checking herself once more in a nearby mirror, she tucked away all signs of Darcy and pulled out the persona of Hela.

Lifting her chin she approached the great doors to the throne room and threw them open with the confidence of a queen. She glided into the massive hall, where her uncle, in his dark navy cloak, stood, brooding over her self-designed marble throne.

"Uncle Thor," she smiled sweetly. "What brings you to my realm?"

"Hela," greeted Thor, upon seeing her. "I seek a certain resident of yours."

"Residents are subject to confidentiality agreements," she said smoothly, as she circled round to her throne. "We are not at liberty to just give you the list, even if you're...related."

"Hela, this is important," Thor's tone was urgent, desperate even. "I need to know if he's alive."

"Who?" she asked as she lowered herself onto the cold marble and slung her legs over one of the armrests.

"You know who I seek."

"Err...no I don't." she assured him, slightly offed by his ambiguity.

"You mean you've not seen him?"

"Seen who?" Now she was genuinely intrigued.

"Hela, have you..." he swallowed. "Have you not seen your father recently?"

She frowned. So something _had_ happened. "Why would I see him?"

"Your father..." Thor said cautiously, "he fell into...into the void."

"He's gone?" No wonder he hadn't been replying her messages: there was no wifi in the void. "How?"

"We fought. I broke the bridge. He fell."

Hela didn't know why she expected any less. Of course Thor'd be the one to break stuff.

She suspected there was more to it, though. Her father was a lot more complex than just three sentences, and his relationship with Thor was even more complicated. But she didn't press further.

"Well, he's not here," she said with finality. "If he were, I'd be giving him a good ol' therapy session to quell his genocidal tendencies."

"Then, where could he be?" demanded Thor, growing distressed.

"Hey, I only keep track of the dead people, and I'm not my dad's babysitter," she made sure to remind him. "So, I guess we'll have to wait and see where else he pops up."

"Will you not try to look?" asked Thor.

"I will keep an eye out for him," Hela relented. "With my good, non-decaying left eye I suppose," she added, trying and failing to lighten the mood - such was not easy in a dreary, grave (no pun intended) place such as Hel.

"Thank you, niece," Thor said, bowing. "This closure has been useful."

Then he turned to leave, but just as he reached the great doors, when Hela thought she'd gotten him out of her hair, he looked back over his shoulder.

"You know, Hela," he began, "you look a lot like someone I met on Midgard. This girl, Darcy Lewis. Sif even mistook her for you!"

She nearly corpsed (how ironic), but managed to collect herself in the nick of time. "Never heard of her, Uncle Thor," she said, and then allowed her lips to crack into a knowing grin.

"Perhaps I just have one of those half-faces."

* * *

 **A/N: Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! Happy (belated) New Year!**

*I had the chance to get up close to the Eye on a ski trip, do check it out if you don't know what it is :)


	6. Chapter 6

Darcy decided to stick around Niflheim a bit longer after her meeting with Thor, just to ensure that the system she'd spent so long to build hadn't bumped into any kinks. She did a check of every department - Communications, Administration, Logistics, Cause of Death, Non-Existential Crisis Support, Psychopathotherapy, etc. She also did a brief sweep for any suspicious activity - knowing the kind of residents in her halls, she wouldn't have been surprised if there was some underground brothel operating somewhere.

Apart from the surge in Jotunn residents, everything seemed to be settling back into order - and there was no brothel, thank the Norns.

For the fun of it, she also paid a visit to her mail room, a storage room for prayers, gifts or fan mail – all of which she received quite rarely, being the scary goddess of Hel and all.

So she was surprised to find a present, sitting in the room, anonymously sent, simply signed "With Love".

At first, she'd thought it was her father, and tore it open hoping for a clue to his whereabouts, only to find a rose with its petals pulled out, leaving only the bare thorny stalk. Knowing her father was beyond such tasteless displays of horny romance, she brushed it off as some residual whacko who still believed in her, or an Addams Family fanatic mistaking her for Morticia.

After a month or so, after another bout of arguments with her neighbour Surtur over territorial rights in Helheim and narrowly avoiding a Lord of the Flies situation during a temporary breakdown of facilities, she prepared herself for the journey back up the Yggdrasil.

It took her about a day to scale the branches and find the right one that led to Midgard. When she finally tumbled out of the portal at Tignes, teleported to Puente Antiguo and got back to the lab, she noticed that Jane had made a new friend.

"I'm telling you, the theory is sound! I've thought it through several times over! And I assure you, if this works, it would change the face of astrophysics, forever!"

"But what if it doesn't work?" A young bespectacled man, cleanly shaven and well groomed, stood facing Jane, his suit looking sharper in contrast to Jane's threadbare flannel-and-jean combo.

"How do you know it won't - Oh, Darcy! You're back!" Jane finally broke from - what Darcy assumed to be - her heated intellectual discussion, and ran forward to give her a hug. "For a moment I wasn't sure you'd return. How is your uncle?"

Darcy was about to ask what uncle when she remembered the sorry excuse she'd given when she'd rushed out of the lab. "Oh! He's good..he mostly misses his girlfriend, the hospital wouldn't let him be discharged yet till he's full recovered."

Nice going, Darcy, talking in metaphors.

She quickly pushed on to another topic before the patheticness of her awful lies became clear to Jane. "I see you have company," she stated, nodding to the man in the background.

"Oh! This is Antonio, one of the engineers from SHIELD specialising in software engineering," she gestured to the man, who simply nodded curtly. "Antonio, this is Darcy, my intern."

"Pleasure to meet you, Darcy," he said crisply, extending a hand.

Darcy took it. "SHIELD, huh?" SHIELD had been sending them money and lab equipment in the past months, but never physical human scientists. Until now there had just been two brooding, shaken astrophysicists -

"Wait, where's Erik?" It hit her now that the older mentor was nowhere to be seen among the piles of lab equipment and things Darcy knew she should not touch.

"Didn't you hear? He's been invited to a SHIELD facility in some top-secret location to assist in some highly-confidential research," said Jane, and she turned to hand Antonio a sheet of codes for a computer programme before returning to her desk and diving into her mess of physics equations Darcy would never understand.

"More like kidnapped, if it's SHIELD," muttered Darcy, as she manoeuvred her way around the lab to the kitchen, setting her backpack down on the table. "What will you be working on in the meantime then?"

"Jane suggested a theory on Einstein-Rosen Bridges," Antonio spoke, as he settled into a chair facing a computer, "and we're aiming to test this theory by building a compact hadron collider to generate an artificial wormhole to another dimension."

"You're gonna try and punch a hole to another realm?" Darcy summed up.

"Basically," affirmed Jane. She spun around on her chair to address the other scientist. "Antonio, would you mind fetching me a transformer? It's in a box labeled 'electric supplies' in the shed. It's out back."

As Antonio left the room, Darcy turned to Jane as the astrophysicist began to add Feynman diagrams to her plethora of complex alpha- and beta-decay equations on the well-used sheet of paper.

"It's not just for science, is it?" Darcy asked quietly.

The pen in Jane's hand stilled. Her eyes remained downcast. "No."

"What if..." she spoke tentatively, "what if he's caught up in other things?"

Jane slammed down the pen, startling Darcy.

"He can't be! He promised! He said he would return!" Jane insisted. "I _know_ he will return!"

 _"Will you go back? To Midgard?" she'd asked Thor._

 _"Unfortunately, Hela, I do not have your magic ability, or your ability to scale through the darkness of the Yggdrasil," he'd replied, looking truly disheartened. "It took me months alone to come down here to Niflheim, and it's just one of the three roots, a far easier target than one of the many branches of the World Tree."_

 _"Well, you could get there eventually if you tried," Darcy try to egg him on._

 _"Young niece," - she hated when he called her that; she wasn't_ that _young - "my services are strongly requested for in the Nine Realms. Marauders have begun to cause disorder across the realms, and as the heir to the throne of the Realm Eternal I must take up this responsibility to return the balance of the Nine._

 _"Surely, as a fellow ruler, you understand that?"_

Darcy's heart ached.

* * *

In the following months Jane's team of science geeks grew, till every morning Darcy would wake to the sound of the Council of Wormholers, as she'd dubbed them, arguing over which scientific law was the most founded or which instrument was the most accurate or even which coffee was the most effective. Eventually, her brain could no longer take the technobabble flying all over the lab every day, and since her internship had long ended and Jane had signed the documents, she returned to Culver University to finish her final year.

When she got back to the university she was bombarded with questions. Was she there during that freak storm in New Mexico? Where was Dr Foster? What did she discover during that internship?

She gave them believable, mundane, false stories that they gobbled up without a question and immediately returned to the buzz about graduation.

Graduation. The last time she graduated was probably from the magic academy in Alfheim, where she'd passed all her tests with flying colours. Now that she thought about it, the Elves probably only passed her to get her out of Alfheim as quickly as possible, knowing of the mischief she was capable of.

Her mortal schoolmates were babbling about the guests they were going to invite, mostly their family, friends, friends with benefits...

"Hey Darcy, you inviting any of your family?"

A boy, Jace, she thought his name was, popped the question to her one day when they were relaxing in a shaded spot under a tree in the campus. Her relationship to this boy seemed foggy, out of focus, like a distant memory pulled from someone else's brain. She'd been tossed back so deeply into the chaos of Asgard, that this routinely, glum human life she'd built seemed strange and unfamiliar.

"Um..." she attempted to provide a suitable answer that wouldn't cause his mortal brain to implode. "I don't think any of my family can make it."

"Bummer," was all he said, and laid back.

It was more than a bummer. She hadn't shown it to Thor, and she would never admit it aloud, but she...missed her father, as mad and twisted as his ways were. She missed having someone to complain to, she missed correcting him about his texting shortcuts. Most of all, she missed the reminder that she still had someone she could call family – without being embarrassed.

The worse part of it was that she didn't even know if he was alive. Was he still falling? Was he stranded? Was he alone, with only the silence to keep him company? The void was an unknown, uncharted territory where even she, in all her reckless impulsive nature, would never dare venture.

She _had_ tried to reach out to him. She'd tried scrying through Hunger, and sending out a signal only he would recognise, and simply groping around the Yggdrasil with her seidr for trace evidence of her father's magic signature. Once, she caught a whiff of something promising, here on Midgard. She was zeroing in on the origin of the seidr when it disappeared, and she was again left grovelling like a blind man.

The graduation itself was anticlimactic. The guest of honour's ceremonial speech went in one ear and out the other faster than she could teleport. All his edifying words, about entering the real world and giving back to society, seemed petty compared to the booming (literally, a 100dB-loud 'booming') demands of Odin when he pretty much forced into her head the idea that he would come at her with his band of Valkyrie and Einherjar if she did not do her job in Hel properly. It got her working hard the next few years, claiming territory and all, but once she had recruited enough dead people to form a logical system of things, she just sat back and relaxed and laughed at Odin, and nothing else in the Nine Realms seemed like a challenge anymore.

Except now, her father had disappeared, Thor and Jane were struggling with an uber-long distance relationship, and Darcy was at a loss of what to do.

Vaguely, she heard the emcee announce her name, and her feet shuffled forward onto the platform. Her arms stretched out the receive the certificate, and her lips spread into a well-rehearsed smile for the camera.

Then her eyes landed on him. At the back of the hall, in the last row of seats, donning a well-tailored suit and a pair of jet-black ray bands, with a smart fedora over his long black locks.

The camera flashed. Darcy blinked.

The seat was empty.

* * *

 **A/N: Apologies for the long wait time...final year is like a scale model of hell. I don't know much about the American college system, so forgive me if I got a few (or MANY) facts wrong.**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: These next few chapters are primarily based off the comic _Thor the Dark World Prelude_ , fyi.**

* * *

After she graduated, SHIELD immediately granted her a scholarship to intern under Jane indefinitely. Her friends called her the luckiest girl in the world, but Darcy knew it was just a ploy to keep a close eye on her and make sure she wouldn't spill the beans on Thor. Not like there was anything much to spill anyways.

So she returned to Puente Antiguo, where Jane's lab had become nearly as busy as a night market. Scientists and SHIELD personnel mingled amongst the instruments and computer consoles, still debating over equations and theories, but on a higher level of excitement.

Jane herself was nearly as determined as Darcy'd left her. The machine was near completion now, its appearance taking the shape of two metal tyres stacked upon each other, with the smaller one on top giving off a faintly hypnotic blue glow.

Darcy did not know anything about how it worked or what exactly it did, so she stuck to the one thing she knew how to do.

"Hey! Excuse me! Pardon me! Important data coming through!" She made her daily journey through the throngs of scientists and equipment alike, weaving her way around like she was doing some interpretive dance.

"And by data," she added, as she reached the station where Jane was working, "I mean coffee." She had self-assigned herself to fetching coffee for all the scientists and making sure Jane didn't faint from starvation. She scanned the lab, and for a moment found herself unable to remember the time when it was just her Jane and Erik. "Jeez, when did this place get so crazy?"

"When we first made contact with an alien civilisation, Darcy," Jane reminded her half-heartedly, her attention glued the computer screen.

Technically, Darcy was tempted to say, you've been hanging out with an alien before Thor even made contact - with your lips, she made to mentally add. It was strange, sometimes, thinking of herself as an _alien_ , especially after watching all those science-fiction horror films with parasitic face-eating creatures.

Eventually, she settled for a simple, "Oh right, that."

Not like her reply would even have been noted. Jane was currently engrossed in a Skype conversation with Erik, rattling off about the readings she was picking up and the high hopes for her Tyre Stack. Darcy wasn't sure if it was the camera quality or the lighting, but the older scientist looked pale and wearied on the screen, his face gaunt with exhaustion and his voice hoarse with fatigue as he spoke.

"Jane, do you think it's wise to be doing this? I'm worried that - " A series of coughs broke his sentence.

"Erik?" Jane leaned forward in concern. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, yes," said her mentor hurriedly. "Just a little headache. I haven't been sleeping. It's nothing." And then Darcy knew what Erik looked like. A prisoner. Erik was a prisoner standing at the beginnings of a long journey through a concentration camp.

Suddenly, a movement in the mirror behind Erik caught her eye - a flash of green and gold, a flicker of black.

Darcy's eyes narrowed as she peered through her black-framed lenses. "What was that...?" she muttered.

"What was what?" asked Jane.

"In the mirror..."

"I didn't see anything."

Dad...?

Before she had a chance to ask, alarms blared out in the background on Erik's side, and then Darcy felt it again. The surge in seidr she'd picked up all those months ago.

It couldn't be a coincidence. What on earth was SHIELD playing with?

" _T_ _hat_ doesn't sound like nothing," she stated matter-of-factly.

"Erik, what is going on over there?" Jane demanded.

"Probably another energy flux. Nothing to worry about," Erik assured as he gathered all his things, rubbing his eye with his free hand.

"Yeah, well, we're trying to _punch a hole_ in space over here," Darcy added dryly. "Feel free to worry about us."

Erik gave one last sad smile. "I'll see you later, Jane, Darcy, stay safe." _Keep her safe,_ he seemed to be urging Darcy. His screen went black.

Just then, Antonio approached the pair, all business. "Dr Foster, the agents are ready to move the device out to the designated location," he reported.

Nervously, Jane tucked a rebel strand of hair behind her ear.

"Great," she said, trying and failing to keep the excitement from her tone. "Let's get going then."

* * *

Of course it had to be the Bifrost site. Darcy smirked as she recalled her first encounter with her uncle. The taser was hands down her best investment from her time on Midgard.

And yet, this was where it all started. Darcy watched Jane fuss about the machine, now set up at the centre of the circular pattern. Had it not been a year ago, when she was fussing over Thor the same way? When she had stared into his eyes and literally been starstruck?

The convoy had surrounded the site with their vans, their headlights on high-beam that lit up the circle. The Council of Wormholers were off to one side fussing over the last minute alterations, while their SHIELD lackeys did the heavy-lifting. As soon as all the equipment was in place, Jane began to brief everyone and double check that they knew their place and role. Darcy knew her place and role – away from all the science stuff where she wouldn't cause a premature explosion.

She stood beside one of the black SUVs, sipping the coffee in her hand observing the scene. It felt as if she were at the edge of a supernova, waiting for the light of the explosion, the truth of the moment, to reach her eyes, dreading the heat that would follow the beauty.

Jane motioned to the rest of the team and everyone got into position. "Everyone on my count, three..."

The scientist punched their buttons and pulled their levers.

"Two..."

The machines whirred to life.

"One!"

With a magnificent bang, a beam of neon blue burst from the Tyre Stack, lighting up the dark night sky with a wavelength that could match the Bifrost.

Directly above them, lightning flashed, like fractures across a midnight canvas, and a hole began to form. Darcy almost didn't dare believe it; it was actually going to work –

Then a second bang resounded, this one like the ear-shattering cry of the void. The beam retracted from the sky, and the hole closed in on itself, before busting outwards in a nebula of dust and vapour, sprinkling the night with remnants of the failed experiment.

"Dammit!" Jane swore. Tiny wisps of neon vapour rose from the machine. "That should have worked!" she cried, gripping the portable console till her knuckles turned white. "Did you see it? The wormhole was beginning to stabilize, but then...then..." she squinted up at the sky, "It was like there was nothing to connect to."

Darcy came to her side and peered over her shoulder at the data streaming across the screen. Then she looked at Jane, her eyes set on the readings yet her mind focused elsewhere, lost in frustration and despair.

"Hey, Jane, I know you've put a lot of work and all into this stuff..." Darcy scrambled for a way to comfort her friend. "But like you've said, Thor _did_ say he'd come back for you." And then she added weakly, "So, he'll come back and –"

"And what if he _can't_?" Jane cut across, whipping her head to meet Darcy's gaze. "What if he's in trouble, or hurt...or..." her eyes widened as a sudden thought struck. "What if he's _dead?"_

Gee, Jane could be a bit melodramatic sometimes. Darcy considered telling her her precious god of thunder was still alive and probably cracking every branch of the Yggdrasil with his bumbling navigation, but she wasn't ready to arouse Jane's suspicions about her identity just yet.

"Tell everyone we start again tomorrow. I'm not giving up." Jane lifted her head to the sky once again, as if she believed that if she stared long enough, she could catch his silhouette amongst the billion stars of the universe.

"He wouldn't give up on _me_."

* * *

Darcy was visited by her grandmother the next morning.

She'd thought it a product of her grogginess at first, or perhaps a trick of the light. But when the cerulean blue spectre would not stop staring at her through the mirror, she realised the Queen of Asgard was in her bathroom watching her brush her teeth.

"Grandma!" she exclaimed, her toothbrush dropping out of her mouth along with a few unglamorous mouthfuls of froth. She hastened to wipe away the rogue bubbles leaking her mouth and spit into the sink. "I didn't expect to see you...so soon." Frigga wasn't exactly the kind of grandmother to turn up at your doorstep with scones and biscuits - much less your bathroom.

"I don't have much time before I have to join Odin for his _third_ tea," said Frigga, with a hint of detestation. "This connection won't last long either. I had to siphon some of the power from your friend's machine to contact you."

Darcy whipped around to face the spectre. " _You're_ the reason why Jane cried herself to sleep last night?"

"Not the only reason, my dear," Frigga assured her. "The portal would have failed anyways. There's no recreating the conditions of the Bifrost."

"Jane could have done it!" Darcy insisted indignantly. It was as if the Asgardians were purposely screwing with her only mortal BFF. Perhaps to screw with her as well.

"Your conviction in your mortal friend is strong, but reconstructing the Bifrost is beyond the Midgardians' science at this point," Frigga shook her head. "But I'm not here to argue with you, my child."

Darcy folded her arms. "Then what did you come for?"

Frigga donned a grave expression, the kind that her professor had when she told Darcy she was six college points short. "Your father," Frigga whispered. "You have to find him."

"Err, newsflash, Grandma, Dad's gone," Darcy said. "I've already tried every locating spell I can remember, but it seems Daddy Dearest is dead or doesn't want to be found."

"Hela...Your father lives." Frigga's revelation came with an air of breathlessness, as if she could not even believe it even as she spoke the words.

Something of a chill ran down Darcy's spine. Her father was alive, but why was she not rejoicing?

Perhaps she had not been hallucinating yesterday. "Where is he?" she asked, not even sure if she wanted the answer.

Frigga's eyes seemed to glaze over (or perhaps it was just the sunlight from her bathroom window). "My vision only told me so little..." she said, an unmistakable tremor in her voice. "I fear he is trapped in a very, very dark place...so dark indeed..."

Darcy's brow furrowed. What could be darker than the void itself?

Frigga seemed to sense her confusion. "There are places you have yet to see young one, things you have yet to witness. There are much worse places in the universe that have yet to be made known to us."

Frigga's tone was getting too dark for her liking. "Hey, alright, if I see him, I'll be sure to bust him out of whatever dark place he's in and give him a good ol' grandpappy worthy-scolding, yea?"

"There are some things you just cannot 'bust' your way out of, my dear," Frigga said gently.

She wanted to tell Frigga that she was practically her equal in status, that she had no right telling her what she could or couldn't do. She also wanted to tell her to get out of her bathroom so she could finish washing up before her prolonged bathroom visit got suspicious. Before Darcy could say any of this, however, a new voice interrupted their conversation from outside.

"Darcy, who are you talking to?"

Darcy released a few uncouth words in Shiväisith, earning a raised brow of disapproval from her grandmother. "No one - "

But Jane had already burst into the bathroom, bedhead and all.

"I thought I heard a - " she froze.

A cheeky, knowing grin tugged at Frigga's lips. "Is this Thor's mortal?" she asked. She looked over to Darcy. "She'll make a very good aunt for you, Hela."

Darcy grimaced, her ears growing hot with embarrassment. A few tense moments passed as Jane stared, open-mouthed, at the sight before her.

Odin be dammed, Darcy mentally exclaimed in horror, she's broken Jane.

Then the astrophysicist rubbed her puffy eyes, shaking her head in self-denial.

"I'm still dreaming," she murmured, then promptly turned and walked away from the smiling ghost in the bathroom.

* * *

It was a few days later that Darcy found herself once again facing a brooding Jane Foster. This time, the scientist didn't even perk up when Darcy faithfully brought her coffee.

"I've tried everything, all the theories, the equations..." Jane had her legs propped onto the desk, one foot on the other, with her arms bent around to support the back of her neck. Her eyes were slightly glazed over, from exhaustion or despair, Darcy couldn't tell.

"Maybe next time you hit a super hot alien dude with your car," Darcy suggested bluntly, "you should leave him at the hospital."

Of course, not that she would ever heed such intelligent advice. "...Everything I've tried, and none of it has worked."

"Jane, it's been a year," Darcy tried once more to reason with her. "Maybe this just wasn't meant to be."

"He said he'd come back for me," Jane muttered feebly, with waning conviction. That excuse was turning dry, and both of them knew it.

Darcy was in the midst of constructing a sentence that wouldn't Hulk-smash her friend's hopes and dreams, when she was saved by the buzz of Jane's phone on the desk. The astrophysicist scrambled to take her legs off the desk, hastily sifting through the mess of papers to find the phone with a set of unfamiliar numbers lighting up the screen.

Slightly apprehensive, Jane picked up the call. "This is Jane Foster," she greeted. "What? No, sorry I can't."

"What?" asked Darcy curiously.

Jane covered the phone with her free hand. "Some astrophysics lab wants me to - "

"Does it pay?" Darcy did not even wait for Jane to finish. This could be her chance to get Jane out of this place, and let her have a breath of fresh air, and maybe clear her head and see the bigger picture.

"Darcy..." Jane said uncertainly.

"Jane!" She was not having it anymore. She would not let her friend waste another second of her mental capacity moaning and groaning about her socially unintelligent uncle. "It's been _a year_."

There was a pause, as Jane looked over at her one last time. Darcy nodded enthusiastically (so desperately that her neck would ache for days after). Accepting that sign of reassurance, Jane turned back to the phone. "Where is this lab at?" she asked.

As she waited, Darcy heard a series of murmurs from the other end of the line, with Jane nodding promisingly in response. After a few more moments, Jane ended the call and stood.

"Pack your things Darcy," Jane said, as she smacked the phone down with a sense of finality and certainty Darcy hadn't seen in days. "We're going to Tromsø, Norway."

* * *

 **A/N: Just a shout out to those who followed/favourited, and especially those who reviewed! It really makes my days and encourages me to continue :)**


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: Minna Vipera –** **oops, all fixed now. Thanks for that!**

 **I've also added in an extra scene in Chapter 2 (7 Sept 2018)**

* * *

There was nothing in Tromsø.

Sure, there were vast, beautiful fjords between the rugged snow-capped mountains, and quaint, picturesque towns with buildings crammed alongside the edge of the glittering waters, but where they plonked Jane and herself, there was nothing.

The observatory was literally in the middle of nowhere. Parked on the side of a rocky mountain where it was warm enough for trees to grow but cold enough for snow to fall, the lab's gargantuan radio telescopes were the only structures to be seen in a mile's radius. Jane marvelled at the lack of noise and light pollution and how easy it must be to observe the stars at night. Darcy, on the other hand, wondered briefly if she'd travelled back in time to her younger days when her family used to check if the Norse had discovered underwear yet.

The car rolled up to the entrance of the building, where there was a group of lab assistants stationed just behind the glass sliding doors like some low-budget welcoming team. Even from several meters away, Darcy could tell the assistant that headed the team was a fidgeter, from the way he perpetually glanced nervously up and down from his clipboard. He reminded her of her former classmates who always tried to bullshit their way through their presentations after finding out about the assignment only an hour before.

"Miss Foster, Miss Lewis," the assistant greeted, as the pair rushed into the lobby with their luggage, eager to seek shelter from the cold. "I'm Larry Larson, the head assistant here."

"It's _Doctor_ Foster, actually," Jane made sure to correct. "I have an appointment with Dr Hilgard?"

"I'm afraid Dr Hilgard is otherwise...occupied at the moment," he said, attempting to sound apologetic. "He has postponed your meeting – "

"To when?"

" - but until then we have arranged for you to reside in the quarters here in the labs," he continued, not-so-subtly avoiding Jane's question. He gestured to his two other colleagues. "Uhh...Mr Belfry, Miss Gardner, could you show Miss Lewis and Dr Foster to their rooms?"

Jane opened her mouth to protest but became distracted when a lab assistant picked up her bag. "Be careful with that! That's high-grade equipment in there!"

As the astrophysicist rushed over to protect 'her preciouses', another lady approached Darcy with a smile that looked more like she was about to brush her teeth. "Miss Lewis, if you please?"

Darcy sent Larson one more suspicious glance, before letting her new escort lead her away from the lobby.

They put them in separate rooms, at separate ends of the building. They told her it was so she could get a better view (of what, she couldn't guess – it was mountains on every side). No doubt they didn't trust Darcy to be anywhere near their sciencey things – or that five minutes in, the tall muscular blonde engineer decided he wanted in with Jane, for reasons that had nothing to do with quantum mechanics.

Not that Darcy wanted anything to do with the sciencey things. She had better things to worry about, like why Mr Larson was so skittish in their presence.

As expected, she got bored within an hour and made to explore the lab. The lab assistant had told her specifically that she could not wander around without a chaperone, so there was no relying on her 'play dumb' card if she got caught. She considered casting a cloaking spell on herself, but with the lab assistants constantly running around searching for this barometer and that Geiger-Muller counter, she supposed it would be easier and less energy-consuming to simply hide in plain sight.

Hence, she snuck into one of the supplies closets she had spotted on the way to her room, and nabbed one of the spare lab coats. Dr Torres would just have to spend a little extra on laundry for a day.

* * *

On her second day of wandering, Darcy discovered the computer lab. Seizing her chance, she slid into one of the seats and began to skim through the files on the desktop, searching for any evidence that would quell the nagging unease she'd felt ever since she'd arrived.

Most of the files seemed pretty legitimate for an astrophysics lab, with the common password needed to access whatever research Darcy was not particularly interested in. Annihilation data, mass spectrometry data, H NMR data, unnamed -

Unnamed.

That had shady written all over it. Giving her knuckles a dramatic crack, she proceeded to warm up her hacker muscles with the security protocols protecting the file. After all, she'd had all the hackers down in Helheim to pick up a few tricks from, might as well put them to use.

Once through, she came face to face with a chain of emails, exchanged between Hilgard and an anonymous source. On top of it all, the most recent email, was from the anonymous source.

And it was exactly the same as the one Hilgard had sent Jane, word for word.

Darcy fought the urge to fist pump. If that wasn't shady, she didn't know the meaning of the word. Fishing her phone out from her pocket, she texted Jane to come quick.

Just as the text was delivered, another alert popped up on the computer screen.

Darcy stared at the blinking icon. She was well aware that she was probably not supposed to touch it...

Darcy clicked on it.

Up sprung a particularly heavily protected file, with firewalls and security protocols alike. Immediately her internal danger alert went off, telling her that it was protected for a reason.

But when did she ever listen to it?

She dove straight into the hacking challenge.

* * *

"It's so frustrating!" Darcy jumped slightly when Jane came huffing into the computer lab a while later. "Whenever I ask anyone why I'm here, they give me two standard answers. One: 'I don't know'. Two: 'You don't have the clearance'." Her voice deepened into what Darcy assumed to be a terrible impression of her new friend.

"What about your new best friend?"

"Who?"

"The guy who looks like a chiseled statue from the Louvre."

"Oh, Gally! He had to rush off," Jane slumped into a chair next to Darcy. "Like everyone else."

"His name is...Gally," Darcy repeated skeptically.

"Short for Galileo."

"Yeesh."

"Took the words right out of my mouth," Jane said. "Anyways, he kept going on and on about his most recent studies on strange quarks."

"Strange cocks?" exclaimed Darcy, mishearing spectacularly. "I knew it! I knew there was something about him!"

"Quarrrk, Darcy, with an R. They're the fundamental particles that form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of nature," Jane corrected, slightly aghast. Then she shook her head. "But that's beside the point. How am I supposed to be of any use to anybody if 'I don't have the clearance'?"

"Well, when I'm done with this, we will."

"What...what?" It was the first time Jane seemed to notice when she was doing.

Darcy's hands skated across the keyboard. "I'm almost through their final firewall. For a lab full of nerdy people, their mainframes aren't that hard to hack."

"You think they're hiding something?"

"Oh, I _know_ they're hiding something. I found an email identical to the one Hilgard sent you. And plus, didn't you see the look on Scaredy Larry's face?"

"Scaredy who?"

"Scaredy Larry, the lab assistant who constantly looks like he needs the bathroom," Darcy explained. "He's not a very good liar; trust me, I can spot one from a mile away."

At that moment, the door creaked open, and their favourite lying lab assistant poked his nose through. Speak of the devil. "Dr Foster, I found you!" Larry exclaimed, entering the room. "I heard that you were asking for me?"

"Yes! Scare - ahem, Larry, I mean, Mr Larson!" Jane stumbled on her words but quickly regained her composure. "Have you been able to contact Dr Hilgard?"

Larry faltered. "Oh...I'm...I'm afraid not."

"Have you even tried?"

"Well - "

"Does Dr Hilgard even want to meet me?"

"Miss Foster - "

" _Doctor_ Foster! You don't even know who I am, what I do!"

Just then, Darcy cracked the last code to the firewall. A new file opened up on the screen. Her breath hitched in her throat - she really wished she hadn't ignored her danger alert now.

"Jane - "

"Not now, Darcy," Jane shut her down quickly, caught up in her tirade against the now trembling lab assistant. "We flew all the way from New Mexico at your request, been here for two days now, and no one seems to know why we're here!"

"Dr Foster - " Gary rose his hands in surrender as if to fend off a bull.

"No!"

"Jane."

"I want to talk to whoever's in charge of this facility right now!"

"As I've already said Dr Hilgard has been delayed," Larry repeated the cold excuse, "but once he arrives he will explain everything to you."

"Jane - " Darcy stressed.

"Darcy, not no - "

There was only one word that could catch Jane's attention now.

"Thor."

Sure enough, her friend abandoned her assault on the lab assistant and whipped around. "What?" She hurried over to the computer, nearly tripping over her own feet in the process. "Oh my god."

The computer screen was now littered with images of a war-torn New York, plumes of smoke rising from the metropolis. The footage being streamed was shaky and low-quality but there was no mistaking the Thunder Wonder and his magical lightning bolts.

"I know right?" Trust the man to be in town and not leave a message. "Jane... This is happening right now."

It was then Gally made his dramatically timed entrance. Upon seeing the file Darcy had opened, a panicked yelp escaped his lips. "You - You're not supposed to have access to that!"

"Why?" retorted Darcy, "Because of your little firewalls and security protocols? How lame do you think we are?"

Jane turned back to the two men with refuelled anger. "So, do you want to tell me why I'm really here, or shall I call Agent Coulson myself?"

Larry began to splutter. "Um...you see, we were told to - "

"Stop," Jane cut across ruthlessly. "Tell me _after_ this is over."

You go girl. Darcy couldn't help the tease that slipped out of her mouth. "Bust-ed."

The two men could only gape, rendered suitably speechless. Darcy turned back to the footage where Hulk was throwing one of the aliens across the Hudson towards Brooklyn. Darcy momentarily worried if her favourite diner in Williamsburg was still intact.

Then the camera, in all its shakiness, came to zero in on the Stark Tower. On the topmost platform of the tower, Darcy caught a glimpse of a figure in green and gold strutting across the catwalk. More importantly, she caught a glimpse of that all too familiar helmet that was unmistakably the gaudiest pair of goat horns in all the realms.

No. Bloody. Way.

That bast –

Then it hit her hard. So hard she doubled over.

"Darcy? Are you alright?"

"I...I'm cool! I'm good!"

She was not good. It was the Feeling, but unlike any other. This one came with a vengeance, so many all at once slipping into Niflheim, so many that would probably require her to add a new wing to her halls.

She grit her teeth. She was going to kill her father. And then she was going to resurrect him and kill him again.

That was it. She whipped out her phone and started to spam.

 **Hela:** What is wrong with you?

 **Hela:** Dad?

 **Hela:** STOP BLUETICKING ME I KNOW YOU'RE HERE ON MIDGARD BLOWING THINGS UP

 **Hela:** DAD!

 **Hela:** D

 **Hela:** A

 **Hela:** D

 **Hela:** REPLY ME IN THE NAME OF ODIN'S LEFT BUTTCHEEK.

 _Dad is typing..._

Finally! After a year of silence, her bank of expletives was just bursting at the seams, ready to be unleashed upon her father.

 **Dad:** who is this

Darcy growled in frustration. What was his game? Was he pretending that he lost his contacts again just to avoid her?

 **Hela:** Your pissed off daughter. What the Hel are you doing?

There was silence on her dad's end once again for the next few minutes. Darcy's brows knitted into an angry furrow. He didn't usually take this long to reply her – was he delaying just to get on her nerves even more?

 **Dad:** where are you daughter

 **Hela:** In Tromsø, but I'm sure as Hel coming over to New York if you don't stop your temper tantrum RIGHT NOW.

She slammed her phone on the table, releasing a breath of air. There was no way this was happening. There was no way her father would be so stupid to come to Midgard and blow up one of her favourite cities. She closed her eyes, trying to tune out Jane's argument with the scientists, the drone of the news reporter reporting live from New York...

Wait.

Live.

Her eyes flashed open and looked up at the computer screen, where her father zoomed by on his floating Segway. Then she flipped her phone over, and she looked down at the phone screen where -

 _Dad is typing..._


	9. Chapter 9

There were so many reasons for her to show off how colorful her language could be right now.

One: the fact that they were probably about to receive a not-so-social visit from someone who'd hijacked her dad's phone.

Two: because she didn't know who it was who that someone was.

Three: because she wanted to blame her genes for her pure talent of screwing things up.

Four: because she knew she couldn't blame said genes, because her father was seriously one of the smartest entities of the Nine Realms, which made her mistake all the more inexcusable.

She should've known that wasn't her father she was talking to. He would not have had time to text her between parading around with his ram horns and blowing up half of New York.

But back to the pressing question: who had she been spamming? Who knew that she was the daughter of Loki? Who knew she was in Tromsø?

All she knew, she didn't want to risk Jane becoming collateral. Her internal danger alert was on high now, screaming at her to get everyone as far from here as possible.

"Hey, Jane?" she said, struggling to keep her tone level. "We should go..."

"I'm not going anywhere." Her friend's eyes were still glued to the screen, enraptured by the scene unfolding in New York.

"I mean New York!" Darcy exclaimed, growing more anxious by the minute. "Jane, maybe we can catch Thor if we hurry..." If they hurried out of here, maybe they won't die...

After a moment's consideration, Jane finally tore her gaze from the screen.

"Good idea, Darce," she said resolutely. "It's time that man and I had a talk."

But just as the pair headed to the exit of the room, there was a resounding boom, and the floor shook.

"W-What was that?" stuttered Larry.

Oh, dear Allfather above...this was not happening...

"Sir!" another scientist burst into the room. "There's...there's an alien spaceship! Outside!"

To Darcy's horror, Jane was the first to dash out of the room, Gally and Larry trailing behind her. Darcy fought the urge to facepalm. Humans, why did they always have to do the illogical thing and run _towards_ danger?

Her hopes of getting Jane out of the way gone, she ran after her friend, dashing down to the lobby and out the main entrance of the lab into the open where there were a group of men armed with 7mm rifles. SHIELD, Darcy guessed immediately, genuinely _not_ surprised. Of course it was their natural instinct to aim at an alien ship five times the size of the lab. It hovered over the forest, shrouding the lab and the surrounding woods in its menacing shadow.

"What's going on?" Jane demanded.

"Madam, you need to get to safety," one of the soldiers said. "Now."

"Jane, big guy's right, we should really go..." Darcy said, hooking onto her elbow and attempting to pull her friend away from the giant spaceship of doom above.

Jane didn't budge. "Are they the same aliens attacking New York?"

"Jane..."

Just then, the underbelly of the ship opened, and its occupants abseiled down to the clearing. Darcy's eyes narrowed. Right. Who else could it have been but her father's new best friends?

Darcy dragged Jane towards the entrance of the lobby where Gally and Larry stood. Larry's teeth were chattering, from the cold or the fear, Darcy couldn't tell which.

The Chitauri landed in front of the armed men, barring their teeth. The rifles went up, ready to shoot. But they were surrounded and heavily outnumbered.

"They're waiting," noticed Jane, when neither party moved. "Why are they waiting?"

 _Why are_ we _waiting?_ Darcy wanted to shout, but not keen on drawing attention to herself just yet.

Then, another hatch of the ship opened, disengaging a small platform upon which another alien stood. This one looked like the Mouth of Sauron in his hood and caged helmet getup. Their leader, Darcy assumed.

Then, before Darcy could reinforce her grip on her friend, Jane slipped out of her hold and went up front. Darcy cursed. This had Thor's bad influence, his stupidity and foolish bravery, written all over it. They should have definitely left him at the hospital.

"Look, I know you came for me," Jane said. "So, just take me and you don't have to hurt my friend and..." she paused as she glanced over Larry and Gally, "...acquaintances."

The Other laughed, with a cackle that sounded more like a cross between a cough and a gag. "Foolish mortal," he rasped. "We are here for the daughter of Loki."

"Hela?" Jane asked.

Darcy looked incredulously at her friend.

Jane shrugged. "I've been reading."

"W-wait, she's real?" Larry squeaked. When he noticed perplexed looks his company was giving him, he quickly explained, "My grandpabi used to tell me stories — used to tell me Hela would come and kill me in my sleep at night if I didn't behave."

Darcy's eyebrows shot up her forehead. That explained so much.

"We smelt the seidr of Lokidottir," the Other snarled. "Your human stench cannot hide her forever."

"Hela's not here," Darcy spoke up finally, hoping she was still minimally proficient in false bravado.

The Other smiled, the cracked lips spreading to reveal the rotting teeth beneath. "We shall see," he hissed, and then he pulled out the device of Darcy's downfall.

Loki's phone.

Shit.

Shit.

Shit.

That big fat son of a Jotunheim beast.

Don't press it, don't press i —

The heavy metal instrumental of "Being Evil has a Price" blared out from her back pocket into the quietness of the forest.

"Darcy?"

She closed her eyes, not ready to see her friend's look of betrayal. Three seconds felt like three hours. The dial continued as she sought to calm the blood rushing through her veins, to quell that mixture of fear and regret and anger and adrenaline that surged up all at once.

Then, she let out a deep breath and opened her eyes, glaring at the Other for meddling in her life.

"Oh, fine, you asked for it." She took out the incriminating piece of metal, switched off the ringtone, before punching in a few numbers of her own.

Two seconds later, Hel broke loose. Literally.

The snow between the two groups caved in, and from the newly formed chasm burst out a well-beaten, gaudily red Land Rover. The SUV arced down towards the snow, landed on its front bumper, flipped and landed back on its tires. The car door opened and out poured Hel's army and about half of their lunch.

"I am never letting you drive again!" Sakichi Toyoda yelled at Henry Ford, before releasing a hail of Japanese swear words.

"How...how did they all fit...?" spluttered Gally, as a crowd of long-dead scientists, writers, warriors, and aliens came to assemble in front of the dumbfounded group of scientist and soldiers.

"Transcendental dimensions," came a proud German voice from the back. "I worked out the formulas myself."

" _Einstein?_ " Had it been any other day, Darcy might have laughed at the way the astrophysicists' jaws dropped.

"You called, Mademoiselle?" Napoleon asked Darcy, standing primed and ready for battle at the front of the crowd with his bayonet unsheathed.

"Is it Ragnarok already, Milady?" asked Bell, beginning to panic slightly.

"Not just yet, guys," said Darcy. She gestured casually to the small alien army. "As you can see, I've got a little Chitauri problem on my hands now, and I wouldn't mind some help."

"What's in it for us?" grunted Blackbeard from the back of the crowd.

"Free room service for a year," Darcy proclaimed.

Nothing more needed to be said. The army of Helheim turned around and charged.

* * *

 _"O war! thou son of hell,_

 _Whom angry heavens do make their minister,_

 _Throw in the frozen bosoms of our part_

 _Hot coals of vengeance!"_

"Hey! I co-wrote that!" Marlowe shouted from the other end of the room as he slammed a brick-thick copy of _The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe_ over the head of an ignorant Chitauri.

"Nice speech Will!" Darcy yelled as she pulled out her taser. "Now can you actually hit something?"

Shakespeare unsheathed his sword. _"I have no more words,_

 _my voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain_

 _than terms can give thee out!"_

"Writers," she mumbled, tasering one Chitauri. She then abandoned the device in preference for her stilettos, throwing a knife at the Chitauri which had pinned Gally down, the silver blade burying itself squarely in the alien's eye.

"You have good form, granddaughter," complimented Laufey as he impaled another Chitauri with an icicle.

"My father was a good teacher," Darcy replied bluntly, and was rewarded with a scowl. She pulled a fan kick on a nearby Chitauri, smashing her heel down on its head and knocking it out. "If you're done making Chitauri popsicles here, I think Nikola Tesla there might need some help," she nodded over to the engineer who had himself surrounded by ten Chitauri.

Just then, the Tesla coil he was hugging lit up the air with violet streaks of lightning. "Lights out, suckers!" he cried as the arcs of electricity struck down the Chitauri in proximity.

"Or not."

"You've been very naughty!" she heard Saint Nicholas yell, and glanced over her shoulder to see him throwing a newly manufactured Beebo plush doll into the face of another Chitauri, before shooting down the distracted alien with a super-enhanced Nerf N-Strike Recon CS-6.

A scream erupted near the main entrance. "Jane!"

She swiveled around, only to find her friend unconscious on the ground with a nasty gash on her forehead. A Chitauri stood over her, raising its claw to strike again.

"Aw Hel no!"

She barrelled into the alien, pinning him against the wall with her right hand around his neck.

 _"No one touches my friend!"_

The seconds coalesced into a flurry of red. The panicked shrieks of the Chitauri were white noise compared to the heartbeat that pounded in her ears, it's floundering claws weak compared to the magic that rushed through her veins.

When she next regained control of her thoughts, there was a smoking corpse of the Chitauri on the ground at her feet.

There was a solid thud behind her as Larry promptly passed out.

Suddenly, more thuds resounded as bodies dropped lifeless against the snow, as if someone had pulled a switch on the Chitauri's lifeforce. Their mothership must've been destroyed, Darcy realized — the Chitauri functioned as a hive mind, as she remembered from her frequent expeditions to Asgard's library, their lives all depended on their mothership.

The Other howled in fury, releasing swear words thankfully only Darcy understood, before turning his platform around and retreating back to his main ship. As the hatch of the underbelly slid shut, the engines started up, and with a resounding boom, the spaceship disappeared from their view.

"Yea!" she cheered, punching the air. "Earthlings, one, Chitauri, zeerooo..." She trailed off as she came to realize where the guns were pointing — at her.

She lowered her fist, and in doing so realized why Gally and all the remaining conscious living humans were looking at her like she was a radioactive substance.

Her glamour was gone. Her right hand had returned to its skeletal corporeal state. She lifted her hand to feel her face, and her heart plunged the instant she felt the withered half-flesh half-bone structure.

Slowly, she lifted her hands in surrender.

"For the record," she began. "I'm not here to kill you in your sleep."

* * *

 **A/N: Thank y'all so much for the favorites/follows/reviews! Really sorry (again) for the long wait, I'd hoped I'd be able to update more often after I graduated, but stuff, and writer's block, etc...anyways, hopefully I'll get over it soon, but for now I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!**


	10. Chapter 10

She thanked the Norns the Bifrost was down. Odin probably would've sat on her for using this much magic in front of humans and on humans.

After a casual momentary distraction ("Hey look! Is that a flying monkey?") she whispered the incantation for the sleeping spell that immediately sent all conscious humans slumped to the ground. She then turned to her soldiers and thanked them for their work and, of course, remembered to sign the documentation for their free room service. Satisfied, they crowded back into the SUV — this time with Toyoda at the wheel — and the vehicle reversed back into the chasm, which closed up after them, leaving no trace of the dead behind.

Then she turned back to the pile of bodies before her. Sighing, she set to work.

* * *

Jane came to two hours later — still not enough time for Darcy to gather her nerves for the inevitable confrontation.

Her friend stirred from her somnolent gnosis as the last rays of light were leaking into the room through the window blinds. Her eyelids fluttered open, then squeezed shut, then opened drowsily again. Darcy watched silently as Jane kneaded her forehead, the same spot on which Darcy had placed a small healing spell on after she'd teleported Jane and Larry to her own room.

Jane moved to sit up, groaning slightly as she did. Darcy had to consciously resist the urge to run to her aid. _You can't_ , she had to mentally chant in her head, _she'll see_ —

"Darcy?" Jane whispered. "What happened?"

A small spark of hope ignited momentarily. "You don't remember?"

Jane's brow furrowed. "There was a...a ship...a fight..." her eyes widened and looked up at Darcy. All remaining drowsiness disappeared from her eyes. "And you."

The hope died.

"It was you, this whole time," Jane's voice struggled to keep together. "You were an Asgardian, and you didn't say anything?"

"I'm technically not — "

"You didn't say anything when Thor came, you didn't _do_ anything when the Destroyer came." Her tone was tethering on the edge of anger.

"Jane — "

"I bet you had a good laugh, watching me speculate and fumble over the workings of the Bifrost while you knew everything about it!"

"Jane — "

"Why, Darcy? Or should I say, _Hela_? Why did you just stand by the sidelines, when you could have done so much more — "

" _I was selfish!_ Okay?" Darcy finally exploded. "I wanted to keep my mundane, ignorant mortal life. I was enjoying it! I was enjoying having normal mortal problems, going to normal mortal university, having normal mortal friends! I wasn't ready to lose it all just 'cause my uncle decided to piss off my granddad and gatecrash my life." She didn't even know where she was going with this. She just wanted Jane to see, to understand...

"And I guess one of the reasons why I didn't tell you is that you were the only mortal friend I had left," she continued. "At least, the only mortal friend I had who didn't look at me like I could send them to their deaths at any time — which I won't, just to make that clear; Odin will strike me down and it would be a lot of paperwork for the fellas down there. It was nice, for a change."

"And I'm sorry I didn't help you with all that Einstein-what's-his-name stuff. Trust me, I don't understand the Bifrost at all, I haven't even taken it in a hundred years!"

Jane remained silent. A mask of passivity had passed over her face.

"I understand if you want me to go. No one ever wants to be associated with me or my brothers - at least, the ones who didn't suck up to Granddad by offering to be his personal Uber. But Fenris and Jormangundr and I, we are _literally_ a triple threat. The Ragnarok Trio, they've been calling us. Would've been a good band name if it weren't for the underlying message of doom and destruction — "

"Darcy."

Her rambling came to a shuddering halt. "What?"

"Come out of the corner." Darcy looked up. Jane's expression had now taken on something almost close to empathy. Almost.

"What?"

"You heard me, Darcy."

"I can't," she whispered hoarsely.

"Can't or won't?"

"I...Jane, I can't cast my glamour spell."

She'd known this herself, of course, but somehow saying it out loud made it _real._ As if the words leaving her mouth solidified her situation, cementing her fate with no way of undoing it.

"The spells I used on the Chitaurti and the SHIELD agents drained my seidr." She closed her eyes, momentarily replaying that moment when she succumbed to that white-hot rage, that instant where she lost her focus and lost control of her magic. "I don't have enough yet to recast — "

"I don't care about the glamour spell Darcy, just come out."

Jane's voice was oddly reassuring. It was so tempting to hold her to her word, that she really didn't care. It was so tempting to believe that Jane could accept her for who she really was.

But it was just too tempting to be true.

"It ain't pretty, Jane," she choked out.

"I'm sure I've seen worse."

Too tempting...and yet Darcy's feet stepped out anyways, bringing her full visage into the sunlight.

Jane's eyes went wide, her jaw falling slack. A shuddering gasp escaped her lips.

"I warned you." Darcy tried to shrug it off casually, barely managing a lighthearted tone she knew would soon crumble in light of her friend's imminent rejection.

It was in that moment that Jane seemingly became conscious of what she had done, and a hand flew to her mouth, as if to pull back that reaction which she had implicitly promised to withhold. But it was too late.

Darcy couldn't blame Jane. She understood her reaction. She was used to it after centuries of seeing that same expression.

But why did it hurt so much?

Jane opened her mouth to speak again, but before she could annunciate anything, a shriek pierced through the room.

 _"It's her! She's come! She's come to take me away!_ Oh _, Odin above please have mercy!"_

The women whipped around and saw that Larry was now fully awake, fully functioning, and fully scared out of his wits. He tumbled from the bed in a flurry of bedsheets, and reached for the nearest piece of furniture - a ceramic-based lamp on the bedside table. He wielded the lamp in an attempt to look threatening, (then again, it was Larry — 'threatening' was a term Darcy would never ever use to describe him) and circled around so that he came between Jane and Darcy.

"D-don't worry Miss Foster," he stuttered. "J-just run, as far away as you can. I'll distract this monster."

Darcy was all ready to protest at the derogatory term, but Jane beat her to it.

"Firstly, Mr. Larson," she cut across coldly, "it's _Doctor_ Foster. Secondly, that is not a monster, that is my _friend_."

Darcy had the uncanny feeling she was mirroring Larry's floored expression. Did Jane just call her her fr — ?

Larry glanced between the two, flabbergasted. "But...but..."

"Just...lower the lamp, Larry," Darcy pleaded cautiously. She didn't want to risk the lamp breaking and sending shards flying Jane's way.

"No!" His voice trembled. He readjusted his grip on the lamp. "You've probably got her under some sort of enchantment! I'm not falling for any of your tricks, daughter of Loki!" With that, he swung the lamp.

Darcy instantly leaned away, the hat of the lamp barely brushing her nose. She then ducked under, grabbing his wrist and securing the lamp, before using whatever little seidr she had left to cast the sleeping spell on him. Larry's eyeballs rolled up and his body went limp against Darcy. She nearly buckled under the sudden added weight when she felt an extra pair of arms support his ribcage. Jane.

Darcy looked up at her friend in relief, but noticed that said friend would not meet her gaze. Suppressing a melancholic sigh, Darcy gently set down the lamp, before the pair hauled Larry back to the bed, settling his prone body on the mattress.

"Jane," Darcy began, breaking the tense silence, "did you really mean what you — "

"I don't know."

Darcy's heart plummeted. "Jane..."

"I...I need time," Jane admitted, voice still trembling. "To wrap my head around all this. It's a really, really big secret, Darcy."

"I know, I'm sorry."

Jane shook her head, her arms folding protectively around her chest. "Please understand, I'm just a bit confused now."

"I do," Darcy assured her. At least Jane was not flat out rejecting her — it was already more than she could have hoped for.

Jane glanced down at Larry's sleeping form. "What do we do with him now?"

"Leave it to me." Darcy leaned over the bed and placed her fingers on either side of Larry's head, just behind the ears.

"What...what're you doing?" Jane sounded as if she almost hadn't dared asked.

"Now that he's under my spell, I can properly tap into his neural synapses and alter his memory. There'll still have been an attack on the lab, and Hela would still be there, but she would be a separate entity from me."

"You can do that?"

"Yea, it's a technique my dad taught me." She felt a small wrench in her heart as she openly mentioning her dad for the first time in a while. But she ignored it. Now was not the time to think about him and his stupidity. "I did it to the rest of the lab workers and SHIELD agents, which is why I don't have enough seidr yet to recast my glamour." She scoffed. "I'd say it's a sacrifice worth making, though. Don't exactly like the idea of SHIELD having a file on me saying anything other than 'Darcy Lewis, blur unpaid and underappreciated intern'."

She completed the memory alteration and turned back to her friend, who was now seated on the other bed in quiet contemplation. "Are you alright?"

Jane's eyelids flickered, and her gaze rose to meet Darcy's, almost timidly. "Are you going to...?" she began hesitantly.

"To...?" Darcy echoed tentatively.

"Do it to me?"

"No!" Darcy exclaimed immediately. "I mean..." She paused as somethingjs occurred to her. No, Jane wouldn't want that, would she?

But she had to ask.

"Do you want me to?"

* * *

 **A/N: ...oops. Hi again. Not dead. Yet.**


End file.
